John Linden is the CEO and co-founder of Mythical Games, a studio building 'player-owned economies' where in-game digital assets carry real ownership and can be traded safely on blockchain rails (NFL Rivals, FIFA Rivals, Blankos Block Party, Pudgy Party). A lifelong gaming entrepreneur on his fourth company, he was previously a studio head at Activision (Call of Duty), president of Seismic Games, and sold a mobile game studio to Niantic. He started programming at age eight on a Commodore 64, wrote laser-projection software for his father's company at fourteen, and dropped out of the University of Kansas at nineteen to run a venture-backed website later acquired by the founders of Myspace.
“Next thing I know, I dropped $600 on 2D images of cats. And I'm like, why did I do that? What happened there?”
“We're seeing a generation where digital identity is as important as physical identity.”
“What we've been very good at doing is making sure there's a solid product-market fit. Is there a real value and real need for this?”
“You don't need to know crypto. You're not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are $20 items, $10 items, $4 items. But you let people start trading and interacting with each other.”
“We're sitting at a higher rating than even Madden was. To me, that was the moment I felt like we had the right product-market fit.”
“We added a concept we called quick trade, and now we started seeing 50% of the revenue was coming from trading.”
“They're trading with millions of other people around the world without really realizing it. It's just a fun part of that experience.”
“If you integrate it properly into everything — from how you deploy code to how the engineers think about it — almost every employee becomes like three.”